A Long Line of Dead Men

"With Reliable? Well, I don't think so, but I wouldn't know if he did. I'm not part of management. I just give them a few days now and then."

"And you're not working for them now?"

"No."

He thought about it. Then he said, "He was, as I said, very troubled by that crime. After all, it had occurred on his watch. There was never the slightest implication that he ought to have been able to prevent it. Each of our mobile units has a considerable area to patrol. We aim for maximum deterrent capability through maximum visibility. The criminals see our marked patrol cars, they know the area's under constant surveillance, and they're that much less apt to commit their crimes."

"Isn't it more a case of their committing them somewhere else?"

"Well, what can any police presence do, public or private? We can't change human nature. If we can reduce crime in the neighborhoods we're hired to protect, we feel we're doing our job."

"I understand."

"Still, I suppose Shorter must have felt some element of responsibility. That's human nature, too. And there was shock as well, coming upon a crime scene, discovering a corpse. There was the stress of multiple police interrogations. I don't say this caused anything, but it may well have precipitated it."

"Precipitated what, sir?"

For an answer, he bent his elbow and moved his wrist up and down, like a man throwing down shots.

"He drank?"

He sighed. "If you drink, you're gone. That's a rule here. No exceptions."

"It's understandable."

"But I did make an exception," he said, "because of the stress he'd been under. I told him I'd give him one more chance. Then there was a second incident and that was that."

"When was this?"

"I'd have to look it up. I'd guess he didn't last more than a month after that man was killed. Say six weeks at the very outside. When was the fellow killed? End of January?"

"Early February."

"I'd say he was gone by the middle of March. Middlemarch," he said surprisingly. "That's a novel. Have you read it?"

"No."

"Neither have I. It sits on my bookshelf. My mother owned it and died, and now it's mine, along with a couple of hundred other books I haven't read. But the spine of that one always catches my eye. Middlemarch. George Eliot wrote it. I'm sure I'll never read it." He waved a hand at the futility of it all. "I have James Shorter's telephone number. Would you like me to call him for you?"

No one answered Shorter's phone. Banszak copied the number for me, along with an address on East Ninety-fourth Street in Manhattan. I grabbed a quick bite at an Italian deli and caught the train back to the city. At the Grand Central stop I switched to the Lexington Avenue express and got off at Eighty-sixth. I tried Shorter from a pay phone and got my quarter back after half a dozen rings.

It was a quarter to five. If Shorter had found a new position, he was probably at work right now, like most of the rest of the city's working force. On the other hand, if he was still in the same line of work there was no guessing his schedule. He could be a uniformed guard at a check-cashing facility in Sunset Park or night watchman at a warehouse in Long Island City. There was no way to tell.

Sometimes I tuck a meeting schedule in my pocket, but it's a bulky affair, listing every AA meeting in the metropolitan area, and more often than not I don't have it with me. I didn't today, so I dropped the quarter in the slot again and dialed New York Intergroup. A volunteer was able to tell me that there was a 5:30 meeting in the basement of a church at First Avenue and Eighty-fourth Street.

I got there early and found out they didn't have coffee- some groups do, some don't. I went to the bodega across the street and ran into two others on the same mission, one of whom I recognized from a lunchtime meeting I go to sometimes at the West Side Y. We trooped back across the street with our coffee and took seats around a couple of refectory tables, and by half-past five a handful of others had straggled in and the meeting got under way.

There were just a dozen of us- it was a new group, and if I'd had my meeting book with me I'd never have found it, because it wasn't listed yet. A woman named Margaret, sober a little over a year, told her story and took most of the hour getting through it. She was about my age, the daughter and granddaughter of alcoholics, and she'd been careful to keep alcohol at bay for years, limiting herself to a single cocktail or glass of wine at social occasions. Then her husband died of an esophageal hemorrhage- she'd married an alcoholic, of course- and in her midforties she turned to drink, and it was as if it had been waiting for her all her life. It embraced her and wouldn't let go, and the progression of her alcoholism was quick and sudden and nasty. In no time at all she'd lost everything but her rent-controlled apartment and the Social Security check that enabled her to pay the rent.